[lightgreen]

“they are either on or off”

This is not true about neither nuclear nor coal.

Nuclear reaction can be slowed down, coal furnace can be used with lower amount of coal at lower temperature.

Nuclear does not need to be turned on or off spontaneously. Nuclear power plant can increase or decrease power smoothly, and that’s practically enough because consumption patterns are easily predicted.

The inflexibility you are describing is nonissue.

High capital cost is. But the largest issue is irrational fears of voters.

Edit: nuclear or coal are not on or off

[berkes]

They can be slowed down. True.

But that takes minutes or hours to do. And on anything but 100% power, the fuel innefficiency is bad. That latter is mostly a problem with coal, but even nuclear is burning fuel and costing wear.

Plants can be optimized to react really fast, or run efficient on lower capacity, or run efficient on max capacity. Choose one.

[lightgreen]

There’s no need to change power output rapidly. Power demand can predicted very well. Sorry, I didn’t understand your argument.

[Lyrex]

You're right that power consumption is predictable. But looking at some great-parent posts I'd assume we're still talking about using nuclear as backup for renewable sources. In this case, often the renewable power production is the bigger variable factor in my opinion, and it's less predictable than usage patterns.